I wrote the following for Chapter 12 of St Cybi’s Well some months back. It’s set near the visitor’s center at Stonehenge, and occurs just as the pandemic influenza* is getting started in the UK, when people aren’t quite sure yet what is happening. The main character, Darnell Sidwell, sees a group of protesting people, and finds out that they’re members of the ‘British Defense League’, my fictional version of this group.

Before he got to the front of the protest, he looked over the fence, saw something of a party going on. People drinking, dancing to music from a portable sound system, standing around smoking. A couple of young men were standing beside the fence, watching the crowd flow by, passing a bottle back and forth.

One of the men saw him looking at them. “Wotcha lookin’ at?”

Darnell walked over to them. He stopped a couple of paces before the fence. “Nothing, really. You?”

“Oh, a Yank, are ya?” The man seemed to relax a bit. His friend, who had been looking down the road, turned to look at Darnell as well. “Jus’ watchin’ this lot go by. Havin’ a bit of a laugh. You got any cigs?”

“No, sorry, I don’t smoke. Yeah, I’m a Yank.”

The friend spoke. “Your lot got the right idea, I say.”

“Howso?”

“‘Bout the illegals.” He turned to his mate. “We should do that.”

“Yeah, kick ‘em all out,” agreed the friend. “All the Pakis and Blackies. They the ones what got this flu goin’. ‘Cause they’s dirty.”

“Uncivilized,” added his friend, taking a long pull on the bottle, then handing it over to the other.

“Um, no, I was just coming over to visit Stonehenge. Isn’t it always like this?”

“Nah. There’s a flu goin’ ‘round. Bad one,” said the man.

“People dyin’,” said the other. “Gov’s tryin’ to hide it, but word’s out.”

“Me aunt’s a nurse o’er London. She tol’ me mum.” He gestured behind him, towards the party going on. “Others heard ‘bout it too. Then some heard th’ nutters were coimin’ here, thought that we’d have a chance to make th’ telly.”

Yahoo News asked Trump whether his push for increased surveillance of American Muslims could include warrantless searches. He suggested he would consider a series of drastic measures.

“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” Trump said. “And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”

Yahoo News asked Trump whether this level of tracking might require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion. He wouldn’t rule it out.

“We’re going to have to — we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” Trump said when presented with the idea. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”

“Registering everyone of a certain religion to a list? We’ve seen that. It doesn’t end well.

“There is no way American Jews will ever find it acceptable for anyone – anyone – to be registered, singled out, profiled, discriminated against, or in any way mistreated by the government on the basis of their religion in this country. Mr. Trump’s suggestion is as terrifying as it is abhorrent.

“This runs counter to everything we believe in as Americans and Jews and we will not stand idly by as fear and bigotry are used to dominate our politics.”

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St Cybi’s Well is set in an alternate time-line to our own, where the United States has become a ‘Constitutional Theocracy’ in part as a response to the 9-11 attacks. It’s fiction.

It was full dark before he passed through Llangynog again, and headed up the Tanat valley. It was just past the first quarter Moon, and the sky was clear and brilliant. One of the things he always loved about visiting Wales was that the light pollution was minimal and he could see the stars almost as well as when he was on a shuttle run. About halfway up the valley to Pennant Melangell he stopped the Rover, shut it off and got out.

He stood there, leaning back against the cold metal and glass, and looked up, letting his eyes adjust. Slowly, more stars emerged, and he was able to trace the passage of several satellites in low orbit. There were plenty that he couldn’t see from the ground, ‘darks’ which were in the service of different intelligence agencies and military forces, but he knew they were there, watching, listening, perhaps even waiting to hunt on command.

And it struck him just how much this echoed something Megan had told him less than three weeks previously: “Look at it with new eyes,” she had said. “Try and see it as the believers see it.”

Was this the same thing?

He could pull out his hand-held, call up the appropriate app, and hold the camera pointed at the sky, and it would show him the satellites his eyes couldn’t see. But to do so would necessarily block his direct vision, his direct experience of the real sky above.

He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket to protect them from the cold, and relaxed a little as he leaned against the vehicle. For now, he’d just take in the whole of the now-visible Milky Way as it arced high above.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This image will give you an idea of how dark the skies can be in Mid-Wales:

It’s an annual ritual. Salvaging what I can of the deer netting, pulling up the long lengths of rebar which pin the support towers in place, packing up chickenwire. While it wasn’t as good a year as it could have been, it was a better year than I thought it would be, and I hope that the next year to come will be even better yet.

They don’t need anyone to come by and kick them while they’re lying there, writhing in the seventh circle of hell, telling them, “Oh, remember those ten books and multiple short stories you wrote? Well, sorry, you stopped writing for a year so none of that counts. You’re no longer a writer.”

* * *

We live in a disposable world. Disposable electronics (when was the last time you tried to fix a tablet, laptop, or television?). Disposable water bottles. Disposable people.

Last week, I did this:

That is, I detached the deer netting I had put on my tomato towers, folded it up, secured it, and stowed it away to reuse next year.

This, actually, was a stupid thing to do. That’s about $20 bucks of deer netting. It took me about 90 minutes to salvage it. The amount of my time (in terms of billable hours) which went into doing that is literally 10x the value of the netting I saved. Stupid.

I don’t mention this to tout how environmental, enlightened, or noble I am. None of those things explains why I did what I did.

Well, OK, I try to be environmentally conscious. But I’m not fanatic about it.

No, I did that because in this instance it wasn’t about economics. Gardening, in purely economic terms, is fairly dumb. I don’t do it to save money. I do it to save my sanity.

Now, that deer netting above isn’t old, or valuable. And how does spending 90 minutes on a weekday morning fiddling around with rusty twist ties and uncooperative lightweight netting save my sanity?

Well, because it gives me time to think.

And thinking is how I spend the vast majority of my time & energy writing.

* * *

It’s an annual ritual. Salvaging what I can of the deer netting, pulling up the long lengths of rebar which pin the support towers in place, packing up chickenwire. While it wasn’t as good a year as it could have been, it was a better year than I thought it would be, and I hope that the next year to come will be even better yet.

I should have been finished with the book two years ago, according to my Kickstarter plan and promises. Hell, even at that point, I thought I would be done with the manuscript early in 2013.

But writing is a process of discovery. Self discovery. I knew this, but having it driven home during the last couple of years has been … sobering.

Other than periods when I’ve struggled to sort out some particular issue with the book, I haven’t suffered the writer’s block which J.H. Moncrieff discusses in her blog post linked above. But upon occasion my writing has made me feel miserable. And guilty.

Part of that is just a sense of failure because I grossly misunderstood what it was going to take to finish this book. Yeah, I’m talking about the time & energy commitment. But I’m also talking about the psychological challenge of writing a book about the onset of the end of the world we know. Thinking through the details of that takes a toll.

Recently I asked an old friend to read the book so far, and give me feedback. As I told him, I have been so deep in this thing that I had lost my bearings — I could no longer tell whether the thing was any good or not. And that was true.

But the deeper truth was that I could no longer tell whether I was any good or not as a writer.